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Your abuse and/or ignorance of statistical analysis is staggering.

Due to the nature of driving, many accidents are simply not preventable. Everyone is doing everything correctly, nothing in the cars fails, but accidents still happen. This is why people designing self-driving cars have to deal with the moral quandary of what the car should do when an accident is unavoidable.

Accidents caused by drunk drivers are 100% preventable. It doesn't matter that they comprise a minority of overall accidents. Also, your assertion that 66% is the "vast majority" is an overstatement. This isn't politics. 2/3 is a significant majority, but 1/3 is also a significant minority. In fact, it is likely the largest single factor that contributes to car accidents. (With a bit of arithmetic, you can easily deduce it must be at least 1st or 2nd.)

Why don't you ask some of the best predictive statisticians in the world about the significance of 30%.

I was kind of curious so I did some quick Google searches. There was one article based on a report about which states are most susceptible to corruption. The top state was curiously enough North Dakota which apparently is due to the fact that they have few laws or regulations in place designed to prevent it. Texas was 1 of 16 states with a passing grade in that report.

Another article discussed the results of a study that looked at convictions for federal anti-corruption laws to establish rankings. Here the most corrupt state was Mississippi. I had to click through to the study since Texas wasn't in either the top or bottom 10, but it's listed as the 18th least corrupt state in the rankings.

One article that did report Texas as corrupt (it only came in 15th) was one which cited a report that looked at laws in systems each state has in place to prevent or curtail corruption. In this case the worst rated state was Wyoming.

FiveThirtyEight also has their own article from a few years back that delves into the topic. Texas does have a lot of corruption convictions, but on a per capita basis, it's in the top third. In this assessment, Louisiana is the most corrupt based on convictions per capita, Kentucky had the worst reporter rating, and Georgia is indicated in having the greatest lack of laws to prevent corruption. Oregon, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are respectively the least corrupt states based on those same categories.

In conclusion, you can apparently measure corruption in several ways and get a variety of results. Texas seems to be pretty middle of the pack in an overall sense.

Now, it is true that Bill Gates had some decent programming skills, and it is also true that I am a better programmer than he ever was, and I am still not as rich as him. But they are measuring the wrong thing: Gates didn't get rich because of his programming skills, he got rich because of his business skills

His father was a well-connected lawyer, and his mother was chair of the United Way (at which time she rubbed elbows with the CEO of IBM) and also on the board of the First Interstate Bank of Washington. He got rich because he had skills, and he was well-connected. He got those skills in the first place because of who his parents were, and because of the opportunities presented by that parentage. If you want to tell the whole story, it's best to start at the beginning. Let's also not forget that Microsoft, under Bill Gates, was found to have abused its position in the marketplace in pretty much every possible way, and was let off with a handslap by John Ashcroft, under George Bush. They often say that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, and Bill Gates is a career criminal.

see here for more.

and I wish this pernicious lie would just go away already. Here is a well researched article showing that fancy dorms and loans are not the cause of sky rocketing out of pocket tuition.

My kid is in college right now. She barely made it into her 300 level courses. There were 400+ qualified applicants (GPA 3.8 or higher) and 200 slots. They did interviews, weighted extra curricular activities, sports and also how likely the kid was to finish the program (yes, available support factored into that, e.g. if your parents could afford to pay your way you're more likely to get a spot).

If it was just a matter of soaking up money they'd do what any business does when there's more demand than supply: Raise the price until supply == demand. They did not do that, because they are teachers, and they want to teach.

Both legal and illegal immigrants in this country commit less crime than its native citizens ( https://www.chicagotribune.com... , https://www.factcheck.org/2018... ). Couple that with the fact that our crime rate peaked in the 80's and is now at a relative post war low ( https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... ) and it becomes pretty clear that what you're getting at isn't even close to correct.

We saw how wrong polls can be with the last American presidential election.

Indeed we saw that polls were 2-5% off the actual result: https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

If that's the accuracy you're comparing to, I think you're reinforcing my point!

Not even slightly true. The gap between CNN and Fox polling is really very narrow. That's because they're both making a good-faith effort to be at least slightly scientific.

For instance, on December 9-11, Fox polled Trump's approval ratings at 46%. That same week, NBC/WSJ polled it at 43%. The next poll with CNN's name on it was Jan 10-11 - 3 weeks into the shutdown - when CNN put it at 37%. Allowing for margins of error and base drift (which has gone against Trump during the shutdown), those are pretty damn' close.

See here for a comprehensive list.

Those polls that are completely and utterly useless in pretty much every respect? Wake me up when something newsworthy happens.

Well, unfortunately for the "I can't hear you" fingers-in-ears crowd, the sad reality is that people are herd creatures and getting folks "On the bandwagon" basically dates to the beginning of civilization. It's just that you suffer from a bias that makes you not want it to be true. It's the same reason why, In spite of every single poll which exists showing otherwise, Moscow Don's supporters absolutely need to believe they are part of some greater social movement, when they most assuredly are not. The rest of the psychology involved, I will leave to people smarter than me. Cheers, buddy!

Make Indentured Servitude Great Again.

In the meantime I'll just leave this here...

is cost. And thanks to abundant work visas we don't need to worry about kids who can't hack it on their own. They can go do whatever it is those people do. Meanwhile we can all have another round of tax cuts at the cost of more cuts to higher education.

Those tax cuts don't pay for themselves. No, really, they don't.

except for the rich kid's dorms. I just put my kid through the dorms (moved her to an apartment after yr 1 because it was cheaper and nicer). Yes, there are "nice" dorms. They're crazy expensive and only for the rich kids. They're a profit center for the schools, and my kid got nowhere near them.

I've already put this link in the thread but it deserves repeating. Once again, Fancy dorms are _not_ the problem. Cutting state and federal funding so we could cut taxes on the rich is. And the rich don't care because you're expendable. They don't need you or your kids to be educated. They've got H1-Bs for that.

any more than fancy dorms are the cause of rising tuition.

Per the article I linked above tuition is going up because we slashed federal and state subsidies. I'm so tired of this lie being repeated...

https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

General stats are in a positive trend. And if you break down the data by cause of death, most of the negative things are highly concentrated in a few troubled communities. The overall statistics are pretty solid.

It is inconclusive that Russia had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 election. Here's Nate Silver's analysis: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-interference-affect-the-2016-election/. Sure, Russia spewed lots of trolling on social media. It's far less clear that it impacted the outcome of the election.

By the way, it's possible that Trump or those in his family and/or campaign might have engaged in fraud, espionage, sedition, or conspiracy. However, they are not guilty of treason, which is defined by federal law:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Simply put, conspiring with Russian operatives against the United States doesn't satisfy the legal definition of treason. If you want to appear like anything other than a clueless troll, you should stop posting that. You certainly are persistent, so I wonder who might be paying you to post your comments on Slashdot.

As long as people trust propaganda and are shown content that reinforces their beliefs, society will be vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors. Like I said, Facebook could address this by showing people a range of content rather than the news feed functioning as an echo chamber. People also need to be less trusting of content, otherwise they will be vulnerable to manipulation. As long as people are willing to trust propaganda, they'll be vulnerable to manipulation.

Natural disasters only cost more than in the past because we are richer and have more expensive stuff to get damaged, at least if you believe the science and the IPCC report. The trend has nothing to do with Climate Change, despite this summary somehow deciding to attribute the entire cost of every hurricane to Climate Change, as if there were never any hurricanes before and they don't have any other causes.

They got burned in 2018. It was one of the weakest midterm flips of all time. Typically the midterms flip HARD against the new President's party.

Pretty much, yeah: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

I am a bit unsure about much of what you write.

Trump is not popular. Yes, in the last strecth of time he has started to be comparable to previous presidents (he is not doing that much worse than the least popular of them), but he has only ever been better off than one president in net approval at the samepoint in their presidency (to be direct, he has been more popular than Truman 3 months in total or so, so far).

It was a blue wave, for any reasonable definition. They got the 3rd greatest election (in vote margin) since 92 and the democrats are typically worse in midterms.

Numbers from https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
and https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

I am a bit unsure about much of what you write.

Trump is not popular. Yes, in the last strecth of time he has started to be comparable to previous presidents (he is not doing that much worse than the least popular of them), but he has only ever been better off than one president in net approval at the samepoint in their presidency (to be direct, he has been more popular than Truman 3 months in total or so, so far).

It was a blue wave, for any reasonable definition. They got the 3rd greatest election (in vote margin) since 92 and the democrats are typically worse in midterms.

Numbers from https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
and https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

subsidized by somebody else then no, you're not dumb. You're doing something perfectly rational. I think the phrase is "tragedy of the commons" but I could be wrong.

Workers are now paying for their own educations thanks to massive cuts to state and federal college funding.

Also, cheap work visas let you get workers trained overseas. These workers are either trained by their governments or (again) often on their own time/dime because of the intensely competitive economies they come from. India is especially bad about this as they've got a massive educated class and not nearly enough to do with them.

What I'm saying is that workers have been made into disposable commodities. But pride keeps us from facing that harsh reality head on and taking the steps needed to mitigate the damage (read: Unionize and solidarity).

Now how about we restore the lost federal and state funding that was cut by this country's right wing politicians (from both parties, Yes, I'm calling out the Clinton Democrats here too)?

I like my schools to be independent, not begging for scraps from billionaires.

There's a few things going into creating more favorable conditions for fires.
The amount of beetle die off is increasing much faster then can be managed. Beetle killed trees, usually pines, burn really well. It is really hard to manage large areas of beetle killed trees. The beetles are worse as winters are not cold enough to kill them off.
Springs are happening earlier, causing much more undergrowth, which then dries out and becomes potential fuel. You'd have to burn everything yearly, which is not practical.
The summers and especially the autumns are becoming drier, dry fuel burns better. There's only a short season where prescriptive burns could even be done safely. The autumns in particular are known to be windy. What do you do about lots of undergrowth?
There are more people living in the forest, it is hard to do prescriptive burning when the forest is full of houses. Those same people demand that fires be put out before their property is burned.
More people also equals more human caused fires. Something like 3/4's of fires are human caused.
A bit of DDGing shows this site, https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... that mostly agrees with what i said above, which is mostly based on what is happening where I live, a ways north of California though it does point out that the temperature increases have been larger then I thought.

Not disagreeing, but you wouldn't know it by talking to people on either side. And FWIW, tribalism has been on the rise in the US for quite some time now...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

showing that you're wrong. Starting in the 90s the State & Federal gov't pulled their funding. That's what made the cost of college sky rocket.

If you had kids in college (or were there yourself) you'd know this, because you'd know that for every 1 spot in the 300 and 400 level classes there's at least 2 qualified students. And by "qualified" I mean a GPA of 3.8 or higher. My kid just manged to squeak in. She was rocking a 4.0 and even that wasn't necessarily enough. She did a special prep program on top of that.

Now, if the reason for skyrocketing tuition was inflationary you'd expect the price to be much, much higher. Since in a capitalist system if you have more demand than supply and can't increase supply you raise prices. But that's not what's happened because teachers like to teach and they are desperately trying to. Even while folks like yourself sit on the sidelines and deride them...

we've been cutting State & Federal funding to colleges since the 90s. See here

If you want nice things you've got to pay for them. Well, unless you're rich. Then you just get the taxpayer to pay for it.

Brian Wansink was recently stripped of his Cornell professorship when he and is lab were caught doing extensive "p-hacking"

But p-hacking is a thing in pretty much every field, and it needs to be stopped.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

Actually, if you go to an aggregate of the polls available, his approval has floated around 40% for the duration of his term thus far. His dissaproval rating has been almost entirely above 50%. I find Rasmussen's 50/49 (IE less than a percentage did not have an opinion) to be...difficult to believe even in these polarizing times.

Posting anonymously so as not to undo mod points given out earlier

Sure, the top 5% of programmers still get decent work.

But no, they don't charge just as much. You're forgetting about training. US colleges are crazy expensive. You're also forgetting that US workers put in 50-60 hour work weeks while the guys overseas are doing 80. And we used to do 30-40 until we were forced to work harder to compete. Sure, they burn out, but there's literally a billion of them.

I don't really care that my oil filter's only good for 6000 miles when it's $20 bucks. That's because It's cheap, disposable, and good enough..

This is like War Games. The only winning move it not to play.

I'm an American, and I'm embarrassed that >41% of the adults in this country fucking adore Trump. His racism, his ignorance, his narcissism, and his stupidity appeal to nearly half the population.

https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

The good news is that Darwin will take care of everything. We've earned Trump. We deserve Trump. I hope it hurts. A lot.

How can you be the "victim party" that faces everyone's bias and be the party in power?

Gerrymandering.

How the GOP Rigs Elections
Republican Ruthlessness and Democratic Ineptitude Got Us Here
Five myths about gerrymandering
How Michigan is an extreme example of gerrymandering
Supreme Court favors Republicans in gerrymandering cases
N.C. has the worst gerrymander in US history. What else is new?
The Atlas Of Redistricting

Except the link you posted is somewhat misleading. It's showing part-time defined as under 35 hours a week, but Obamacare used a definition of 30 hours a week for part-time for benefits purposes.

As a result, people working 25-29 hours increased after Obamacare was passed, while people working 30-34 hours decreased.

I wish I had your confidence. Despite how awful Trump is, support for Trump and the Republicans is fairly strong. It's not clear the Democrats will even retake the House; they are presently favored to, but not by much. There's a real chance of the Republicans simply staying in power indefinitely and keeping Trump's policies in place to keep his base happy.

What, like with a submarine or something?

Yeah like that. You don't know its there until its deadly strike is on its way or has actually impacted. That is what a submarine in warfare is all about.

If you have having difficulty with the idea I would suggest you read FiveThirtyEight's analysis which makes the case pretty clearly.

It's a purely political move. Hatch has got his tongue so far up Trump's backside that he can taste what Trump's eating before he swallows.

Trump puts the hate out on google, Hatch responds by saying "Hey! I hate google too!"

I'm not saying that this isn't a smart thing to do, at least in the short term, but he's not concerned about antitrust or regulation. He's concerned about being on Trump's good side, and antitrust and regulations are the tools he happens to be using now to get that done. He's not suddenly into regulation, it's just that the ends justify the means.

https://projects.fivethirtyeig... proves this out, btw, if you're more interested in stats than clever metaphors about ass kissing sycophants.

"so instead of targeting guns, maybe we should get to the bottom of whats driving homicide. Banning sudafed sure as fuck didnt stop the use of meth. All it did was make it a real PITA for me when I actually need the shit. I have to get my ass to a pharacist between the hours of 9am and 8pm. If something comes up outside this time I have to deal with the problem until then."

We know severally limiting guns works because we can see it working in every other first world nation. As for finding what's driving homicide, we generally know that already, those problems are just very hard to fix like large scale wealth inequality.

"Something has changed in the last 30 years that makes people massively more likely to commit homicide than in previous decades. "

This couldn't be farther from the truth. Homicide rates have been pretty consistently dropping for the last thirty years https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... . News media sensationalism is what is at a thirty year high. ...and the rest of your post is predicated on your misunderstanding of this part of modern US history so that's it.

That is correct. First of all, bookmakers have gotten incredibly good at setting the line. Almost all the time, the same amount of money comes down on either side. When it doesn't, they lay their bets off on a bigger book.

As I understand it, this isn't true anymore and it's part of the reason bookmakers are upset about smart money. Putting the line somewhere that keeps the sides balanced is the safest way of running a sports book, but it isn't necessarily the most lucrative. The bookmaker can make more if he's smarter than the average better and sets an unbalanced line that leaves him with smart money bets.

According to 538, at least, that's what has been happening. The bookies used to try to balance their bets, but they've been getting better at keeping some of the smart action for themselves. If that's true- and that's what the numbers seem to say- then their bottom line really is helped by keeping sophisticated betters out of the action.

Data dump for Mr Skeptovich.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-you-found-in-3-million-russian-troll-tweets/

Sign here please.

Turnout.

"Right Troll and Left Troll are the meat of the agency’s trolling campaign. Right Trolls behave like “bread-and-butter MAGA Americans, only all they do is talk about politics all day long,” Linvill said. Left Trolls often adopt the personae of Black Lives Matter activists, typically expressing support for Bernie Sanders and derision for Hillary Clinton, along with “clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout.”"

Link

During 1999-2015, the mesothelioma age-adjusted death rate decreased 21.7% from 13.96 per million population (1999) to 10.93 (2015) (p-value for time trend

So basically the mesothelioma death rate (from all causes, not just asbestos related) went from 1.396 per 100,000 to 1.093 per 100,000 per year.. Or a reduction of 0.3 per 100,000 per year. That puts the benefit of banning asbestos at the very bottom of the list of causes of death, even if you assume 100% of mesothelioma was caused by asbestos.

The money we spent banning and ripping out asbestos probably would've been much better spent on things like PSAs to buckle your seat belt, or suicide prevention hotlines. Those have a death rate nearly a hundred times higher than the reduction in mesothelioma death rate. Heck, fires kill 5.0 people per 100,000 each year, so it's even possible that banning asbestos resulted in more people dying to fires than were saved from death by mesothelioma.

Based on this one paper, it would seem that banning asbestos was a vast overreaction. Given the tiny scale of the problem, it probably would've been better addressed by stricter regulations mandating masks and filters during the mining and processing of asbestos, and manufacture of products containing asbestos, rather than a widescale ban. Kinda like how disproportionate news coverage of airliner crashes has caused us to spend more on preventing airliner crashes, resulting in air travel being 86x safer than cars.

I haven't seen that. It looks like they've been trending down.

Looks like they have been pretty damn flat for the past year. https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

To be clear he still has the worst approval rating is dismal, but then that's where it also started.

Since Slashdot didn't put at least two submissions on the topic, for your perusal:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

According to 538... about 31 seconds

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

Here is analysis by the 538 statistics site, which explains roughly how the timing is supposed to work... and how they are always shortchanging the added time, regularly in excess of 10 minutes.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

538's tracking it. See here. There are plenty of right wing Democrats who support what he's doing. They helped him repeal Dodd Frank in piece meal, so you can thank those right wing Dems like Pelosi & Schumer for the next election.

1. Hillary was consistently ahead in national polls until the last month or so when there was considerable tightening detected by pretty much all of the pollsters. HRC won the popular vote by a 3 million yet lost the electoral college due to narrow Trump wins in three battleground states. Those are facts, not an example of astroturf.

2. Polling has at no time indicated majority support for Trump's impeachment. Trump's approval rating has been remarkably consistent, holding steady at 35-43% in his first 500 days. He's unusually unpopular for a president so early in the presidency, particularly with solid same party control over the government. Those are also facts, and also not an example of astroturf.

3. The Democratic party has been racking up an unusually large record of wins in 2017 electoral contests that would seem to support the "blue wave" notion, as does Trump's low approval rating, plus long standing historical trends for the President's party to lose seats in the House and Senate during the midterms. Those are even more facts, and still not an example of astroturf.

You don't have a clue what "astroturf" is, do you.

It got attention because of Russia meddling in US politics. Don't be obtuse.

It got attention because Hillary lost, and there had to be *some* reason for it that didn't put the blame on Hillary or the Democrats.

Along with sexism, misogyny, Bernie Sanders, Wikileaks, low information voters, women under pressure from men, and James Comey.

Hillary's comment is informative:

"I never imagined that [Putin] would have the audacity to launch a massive covert attack against our own democracy, right under our noses - and that he'd get away with it."

The Russian interference amounted to about $1.25 million per month, compared to the $1.2 billion spent by Hillary, or $617 the million spent by Trump.

But it's probably good to be able to tell who's purchasing ads in future elections.

That's cute you think Republicans aren't as concerned about how Trump won, or do you think anti-establishment means anti- the other party?

It got attention because of Russia meddling in US politics. Don't be obtuse.

It got attention because Hillary lost, and there had to be *some* reason for it that didn't put the blame on Hillary or the Democrats.

Along with sexism, misogyny, Bernie Sanders, Wikileaks, low information voters, women under pressure from men, and James Comey.

Hillary's comment is informative:

"I never imagined that [Putin] would have the audacity to launch a massive covert attack against our own democracy, right under our noses - and that he'd get away with it."

The Russian interference amounted to about $1.25 million per month, compared to the $1.2 billion spent by Hillary, or $617 the million spent by Trump.

But it's probably good to be able to tell who's purchasing ads in future elections.

There are not really that many truly "independent" voters.

Americans Arent Becoming More Politically Independent, They Just Like Saying They Are

> They both have broken the Law.

Seeking asylum is not against the law. And yet, if you come to the US-Mexico boarder seeking asylum, you will be arrested and your children, if any, will be confiscated.

And I say "confiscated" because there is a nonzero chance that separation will be permanent.

> No it's not pleasant, no it's not ideal.

It's un-American, it's illegal, it's racist, and it's completely unnecessary. It's throwing gasoline on what is already a dumpster fire of a humanitarian crisis.
=Smidge=

How long do you suppose it would take to find out?

If you want a real answer, it looks like four years is about average for this type of investigation.